Obama camp: Our convention will be better

8/31/12 3:11 PM EDT

Obama campaign officials predicted on Friday that Democrats will do a much better job delivering a substantive message at their convention than they say Republicans did at theirs.

"Our goal next week is to bring the choice in the election into focus for the American people, and I think throughout the week, that choice will be crystal clear," deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter said. "Unlike Republicans who really just sought to tear down the president over the course of three days, you know, we’ll make an affirmative case for the president, but also an affirmative case for where we want to take the country and how we’ll strengthen the middle class."

Senior adviser David Axelrod also tore into the GOP confab in Tampa, alleging it lacked specifics and wouldn't produce a sizeable bounce in the polls because of it. He also suggested that much of the GOP convention content appealed to base conservatives instead of undecideds and independents.

Axelrod said that President Obama is still working on his acceptance speech, but that the central message has already been decided:

"The message we want to hammer home is that this president is committed by experience, by belief and whole-heartedly to rebuilding an economy in which every person who worked hard can get ahead, in which the middle class is secure, and in which Americans can have confidence that their children can look forward to something even more in the future," he said. "That is what we’re going to convey. That is the reality.

"And the advantage we have is we're not building our campaign on artifice," he said, adding a not-so-veiled reference to previous charges the Obama camp has made that the RNC based its convention on falsehoods. "We're building it on the causes and the themes that have animated Barack Obama's life and that he’s been working for throughout his life and throughout his presidency, and we're going to amplify those is this convention."